Pop singers from Bryan Ferry to Taylor Swift have likened love to a drug, as have folks with a little more clinical authority, like neuroscientists. In Lucy Prebble’s “The Effect,” a pair of psychiatrists are led to ask if a drug can in fact produce love, or at least reproduce its delightful and disorienting symptoms.
First produced in 2012, Ms. Prebble’s play introduces us to Dr. Lorna James, who is overseeing the clinical trial of a potent antidepressant that lifts dopamine levels in the brain, and her supervisor, Dr. Toby Sealey, with whom she has obvious but at first unspecified personal history. We also meet Tristan and Connie, a young man and woman who volunteer to live as monitored inpatients at a facility as the drug is tested on them.
In the new production of “Effect” that has just arrived off-Broadway, after an acclaimed run at the U.K.’s National Theatre, the set design, by Soutra Gilmour, summons less a location than a vibe: chilly, futuristic, forbidding. The long stage — lit by Jon Clark to suggest a sci-fi horror movie — is virtually bare except for two chairs at opposite ends, where Lorna and Toby spend much of their time seated; Tristan and Connie are generally between them, so that they can be carefully observed, like lab animals.
The director is Jamie Lloyd, whose penchant for stark, sometimes mannered minimalism informed Broadway revivals of “Betrayal” and “A Doll’s House” in recent years. In Ms. Prebble, a fellow Brit, he has a collaborator who’s a contemporary — both are in their early 40s — and a razor-sharp wit: Her more high-profile credits include the scathing satire “Enron” and the series “Succession,” which I’m still mourning nearly a year after its final episode aired.
The people we meet in “Effect” are, for the most part, more likable, or at least sympathetic, than the characters who dominated those two projects. Taylor Russell and Paapa Essiedu, the attractive and engaging actors respectively cast as Connie and Tristan, emphasize the shared vulnerability of their superficially different characters — she’s a college girl with an older beau, he’s a working-class lad who seemingly is still sowing his oats — as they fall madly in love during the trial.
To what extent their passions are stoked by the chemical stimulants they’re being fed remains in question, particularly after it’s disclosed that at least one of them may be receiving a placebo. Their situation also, obviously, raises an ethical dilemma: Most simply put, is it okay to mess around with people’s brains, even if the desired outcome is helping them lead happier, healthier lives?
That old and yet eternally timely conundrum weighs heavily on Lorna, who we learn has been loath to take psychiatric medication herself. She’s played here, with brisk wit and deep compassion, by Michele Austin, who like the other actors in this production (all retained from the National) is Black. Ms. Prebble has provided her Lorna with a new line, uttered after Toby asks if her refusal to self-medicate is “a political act.”
“I’m a working class Black woman,” Lorna retorts. “Getting out of bed is a political act.” It’s one of a few tweaks — none of the others seem to involve race — that encourage anyone who has seen “Effect” before to look at the characters and their different challenges anew. Connie, for instance, is now Canadian, and thus a cultural outsider, even if her pursuit of higher education suggests she has more in common with Lorna and Toby than Tristan does.
Mind you, Toby, the play’s least endearing figure, appears to occupy his own realm. The son of a heart surgeon, he’s at once a thoughtful scientist and a careerist rogue, a man whose professional and personal antics — we learn of the latter gradually — point to a less than total dedication to doing no harm. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith imbues him with a serene imperiousness, speaking in a soft, husky voice that can be as alluring as it is unsettling.
There are ultimately no villains in “The Effect,” though, just imperfect people struggling with the fact that, as Cole Porter once put it, “We’re merely mammals.” Perhaps the mystery of love is best explored in song, but Ms. Prebble’s study of this enigma, and others, remains compelling.
ELYSA GARDNER
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